V. S. Naipaul is both one of the most highly regarded and one of the most controversial of contemporary writers. Widely admired in North America and Europe for the lucidity of his prose style, his incisive travel journalism, and his ironic accounts of colonial and postcolonial societies, Naipaul has not generally met with the same favorable reception in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Comments he has made on places he has visited for his disaffected newspaper reports on the Third World have stirred up considerable animosity against him in many of the countries he has visited in Asia and Africa. His dismissal of his native Trinidad as "unimportant, uncreative, cynical" and of the West Indies as the "third World's third world" has elicited a similar response in the Caribbean, while two of his books about his ancestral homeland of India, An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), which dwell on the outdoor defecation habits of Indians and the way in which the Hindu doctrine of Karma has enmeshed the populace in a quietism tantamount to psychic paralysis, have brought his name into fairly general disrepute among intellectuals on the subcontinent.
